Page:In the dozy hours, and other papers.djvu/16

 2 into an agreeable haze. Lamb, indeed, with characteristic impatience, sighed for the waters of Lethe that he might have more than his due; that he might grasp a double portion of those serene pleasures of which his was no niggardly share. "I feel as if I had read all the books I want to read," he wrote disconsolately to Bernard Barton. "Oh! to forget Fielding, Steele, etc., and read 'em new!"

This is a wistful fancy in which many of us have had our share. There come moments of doubt and discontent when even a fresh novel fills us with shivery apprehensions. We pick it up reluctantly, and look at it askance, as though it were a dose of wholesome medicine. We linger sadly for a moment on the brink; and then, warm in our hearts, comes the memory of happier hours when we first read "Guy Mannering," or "The Scarlet Letter," or "Persuasion;" when we first forgot the world in "David Copperfield," or raced at headlong speed, with tingling veins and bated breath, through the marvelous "Woman in White." Alas! why were we so ravenous in our youth? Like the Prodigal Son, we consumed all our fortune in a few short years, and now the